Many end-users want access to multimedia files including music, videos, games, photographs, etc., even while they are away from their personal computers or laptops. A convenient method for an end-user to access their multimedia files is to store their multimedia files on their cell phone. Therefore, storage requirements for cell phones are expected to grow significantly in the coming years. However, providing large storage space on a cell phone is problematic due to the size and expense of very small storage devices (e.g., media cards and small internal hard disks).
A conventional method for an end-user to store a large amount of data and access the data is through a web-enabled cell phone. The end-user may access the Internet and utilize online web-based storage repositories (websites) to store the multimedia files. These storage websites allow an end-user to store data on the website and also allow the end-user to access the data from mostly anywhere on the web-enabled cell phone. In particular, an end-user may log-on to the website from a web-enabled cell phone, and then gain access to all the files that the end-user has uploaded onto that website.
However, most storage websites are designed to be accessed by desktop and laptop computers. Accordingly, security measures, access protocols, uploading and downloading files are designed for use by computers. Specifically, the websites usually require the HTTP protocol that runs over TCP, which is known to perform poorly in high error rate wireless environments. Furthermore, HTTP is a wireless connection agnostic, which is designed for wireline link connections that are reliable and stable. In contrast, wireless link quality can vary considerably depending on user location and/or the number of other users sharing the wireless connection.
Another limitation for a cell phone is that it must have the storage capacity to download and play a large media file. Manual deletion of local files on the cell phone may be required prior to download, which may be time consuming and inconvenient.